Environment Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, who spoke with her typical authority and strong logic. I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly those in respect of agriculture and as chair of UK Squirrel Accord, of which more later.

I shall speak to Amendment 260A, which stands in my name, and Amendment 259 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. One plank of this Bill is afforestation. We have heard much throughout the many days of debate on the Bill about the benefits of carbon capture and the biodiversity dividend of afforestation. It is worth recalling that the level of afforestation in the United Kingdom in 1919, just after the First World War, was just 5%. Today, it is 13%, but the 2021 EU factsheet on afforestation for the EU shows that it is 37% afforested. In his very good speech at Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington pointed out that it is important to balance food production with forestry on our limited land area, but I still feel that 13% is the wrong number and needs to go up significantly. I agree with many others who have said that over the course of our many days.

The problem is that simply planting trees is not enough. Amendment 260A is about the management of the main animal damage threats, while Amendment 259 is its biosecurity analogue. The squirrel problem is very simple in that grey squirrels ring-bark trees between the ages of about 10 and 40 and suck out the sap. This damages the trees and kills many of them. UK Squirrel Accord was formed five or six years ago to try to combat this at a UK level. It comprises the four Governments, their nature agencies, the main voluntary bodies and the main commercial sector bodies. There are 40 signatories overall. It seeks to co-ordinate not only communication among those bodies so that everybody knows what is going on but the use of science in controlling squirrels, and that science will of course be able to be used for the control of deer.

The key thing at the moment is the fertility control project, which is getting to the end of its third year at the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s main laboratories just outside York. The project will do exactly what it says on the tin, which is to control the fertility of grey squirrels and therefore shrink their numbers dramatically.

This year saw a very interesting piece of academic research by the Royal Forestry Society on the level of the problem that the grey squirrel poses to afforestation. It is called An Analysis of the Cost of Grey Squirrel Damage to Woodland. It is quite a lengthy report, and I shall not give your Lordships all the details, but 777 land managers were surveyed. They said clearly that the greatest threat to them in trying to grow woodland was the grey squirrel, and 56% of them said that they were experiencing damage quotients of between 35% and 100%, with only 14% feeling that the damage quotient was less than 5%. I should say in addition that the oak tree, which is one of the most iconic species for our country, is the greatest supporter of biodiversity, with some 2,000 species supported by oak trees.

The UK Squirrel Accord and its associated voluntary bodies are extremely worried about there being safe zones for squirrels because some people do nothing. The biggest problems we see in those safe zones are patrolled by Amendment 260A. First, if you have been in receipt of a grant or if you are a public body—this is a very big problem—you must comply with the animal damage protection standard. If you are somebody else, you will be encouraged to comply with it. Given those who are interested enough to participate in the UK Squirrel Accord, I think people will obey that, but I feel that some motorway and railway agencies in particular are doing nothing at the moment and therefore have a lot of safe harbours for the squirrel.

I will say a brief word on the cost of compliance. I congratulate the National Forest Company, which has employed volunteers to help with some of its control issues, greatly reducing any costs that may be involved. I believe there is a significant number of volunteers—the UK Squirrel Accord is very much in touch with them—who would assist with that and therefore help with the cost element.

I turn briefly to Amendment 259. I feel that the science will get there for Amendment 260A in the end, and we will have sufficient scientific weapons to be able to reduce the level of grey squirrels in the country so that it will be commercially possible to plant broadleaf trees in the south of England again. We will hear about that from later speakers. The difficulty is that the disease problems associated with importing trees, particularly pest problems such as the oak processionary moth, fill me with an appalling dread. Here I very much agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said just a moment ago. It is important to be a bit like a Chinese doctor and act before some of these problems arise, and act very strongly indeed. Both these amendments are enabling provisions for afforestation. We will not get there without them.

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to follow the noble Earl. I declare an interest as an owner of a plantation on an ancient woodland site, mostly replanted in 1986. I reckon that my cumulative loss to squirrels is about 60%. There are areas of the wood where nothing has survived except the coppice regrowth, and a lot of that is damaged. I have been trying to control squirrels throughout that time. This is a really serious problem if we want to take trees seriously, particularly if we want them to be commercial. I therefore very much support Amendment 260A. It would be a really useful way to go, getting us all working together in the same direction.

Deer are important too. Those who know the border between Wiltshire and Dorset will know the troubles the RSPB has had in Garston Wood with the herd of fallow deer it had there. It got zero regeneration at the end of the day because there were just too many deer. It has now excluded them, which is not fun for the local farmers, but at least it solves the RSPB’s problem. However, generally we have to recognise our position in this ecosystem. We are very important as the top predators—the controller of what happens with herbivorous activity—and if we want particular species and kinds of things to grow, we must act on that responsibility.

We need to start to understand how regeneration is working around us. Oak regeneration does not seem to be happening at all, something that is echoed by other people in the south of England. I do not know what circumstances need to change to make the ecology right for that. These are things that, with a big ambition for forestry, we need to understand. We do not want to have to be for ever planting trees; we ought to be able to rely on a pattern of regeneration.

I am very much in favour of the direction of Amendment 259. We need to be quite strict about the diseases that we let into this country. We have a very limited degree of biodiversity when it comes to trees and shrubs; we have about 30 different ones, around one-tenth of what an ideal temperate woodland would have by way of variety—courtesy of the Ice Ages, mostly, and the opening of the Channel but also, subsequent to that, the effect that man has on restricting the natural movement of plant species. We need, as the Forestry Commission is setting out to do, to improve our genomic diversity within species as well as the number of species that we have.

While I do not at all resent the activities of the Romans and others in bringing across chestnuts, for instance, or the buddleia in my garden—a cousin to many that are spread over the south downs—I do not think additional biodiversity hurts us. We are a very impoverished ecosystem and should be able to stand some introductions—but not, please, diseases. We have seen the devastation caused by ash dieback around here in Eastbourne. With a limited ecosystem, each disease is a big hit, and we do not want to risk more of that because it will take a very long time before we have a more diverse forest population.

However, I am not convinced by Amendment 258. As I said, I own a plantation on an ancient woodland site, and an SSSI designation would be a disaster. There is so much needed to do to make it better. The point of an SSSI is that you pick on a bit of landscape that is as you wish it to be, and the focus is then on keeping it as it is and making it difficult for people to change it. A plantation on an ancient woodland site means a lot of restoration to do, and you do not need the level of bureaucracy that goes with being an SSSI. I would be happy to have something to give it greater protection against invasion by planners but not something that stops the woodland owner from making it a better wood.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this group on the subject of trees. As we know from the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and the Woodland Trust, which I think she chairs, only some 7% of our woodland is in good condition. We have a very small percentage of cover—13%—as has been noted by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and ancient woodland covers roughly 2.5% of our area.

I have put my name to Amendments 260 and 283, but I shall start with some comments on Amendments 258 and 259 about ancient woodlands and SSSIs. I very much take the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in that SSSIs can be complicated areas involving many rules. One issue that we have not tackled in the Bill, and which appals me, is that—if I have this right—the target by which to get 75% of SSSIs in good condition is 2045. I am sure the Minister will put me right if I am wrong, but it is an atrocious statement of where we are and where we intend to be if that is the case. Having said that, I can say on behalf of my colleagues that we would very much welcome this sort of amendment, even if it were not drafted exactly as at present.

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I welcome the steps that the Government are taking regarding illegal deforestation; however, Governments could make legal deforestation that is currently illegal in order to circumvent new measures—then we would have a problem. We should also be taking into consideration the many other issues surrounding this general subject; I think particularly of the cutting down of primary forest for biomass both in Europe and indeed in the US and Canada. These are difficult issues, perhaps too complex for us to include in this Bill, but we must address them. What we can do is ensure that we have full parliamentary accountability.

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group: Amendments 263 and 265. I thoroughly welcome the Government’s approach in this area. We have a responsibility as the consumers of forest products to make sure that they are sourced in a way we are comfortable with. To keep blindly consuming, say, palm oil without regard to the consequences is to take less than our responsibility for what is happening. It is our demand that is driving the production, and it is therefore our responsibility. We need to find ways in which we can exercise that responsibility without encroaching on the national rights of the people doing the producing. For instance, in the case of palm oil, I think it is entirely reasonable to ask that it is produced without further encroachment on virgin forest. My Amendment 263 suggests that we should also include peatlands and wetlands within that definition of “forest”. Both of these are environments that palm oil plantations can encroach on. They are both environments of great ecological significance, and we should therefore have as much interest in them as we do in a forest.

In order to know what is going on in response to our demand for palm oil, we need some information. The obvious information we have access to is satellite records, but they are not much use unless you can tie them to what is happening on the ground. We will need some form of baseline—I hope very much that COP 26 may provide that—or a map of where things are so that change can be measured from that. We need to be conscious of the fact that it is not necessarily the big boys doing the encroaching. It can be small farmers, subsistence farmers or people working out a small living who make the first cut, and then the big boys come in behind them, reward them and move them on to the next patch of virgin forest. What we need to watch is not some small detail but the overall effect, so that we know that palm oil sourced from a particular area or country has been done so ethically.

Amendment 265 deals with how we might make that work. I am suggesting that we should be able to give our approval to an organisation such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil so that we can use it as an internationally recognised collaborative method of telling us which sources of palm oil are ethical. Then we should build some reward into that system. I am sure we would come up against the WTO again, but, as we have discussed before this evening, we need the WTO to become responsive to environmental imperatives. If a country is producing ethically farmed palm oil, we should be able to reward it with a premium, which should then go back into the process of making sure that palm oil is ethical and supporting the people producing it on those terms, so that we get a virtuous circle.

Those are my two suggestions for how we might make things more effective than they appear to be in the Bill. It is important that we look for a system that does not just deal with the import of the primary product but enables us to get at imports that contain substantial amounts of the product; otherwise, we just disadvantage our own producers. Working through something like a round table or an import tariff scheme would allow us to do that.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 264A. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, was very keen to speak on this amendment, to which he added his name, but for technical reasons was unable to do so.

I congratulate the Government on their attempt to tackle the alarming rate of deforestation. They plan to do this by prohibiting the use of certain commodities associated with illegal—I emphasise the word—deforestation and by requiring large companies to undertake due diligence and report on their activities in the relevant areas. I emphasise the word illegal because here lies the risk; the Bill as it stands risks incentivising Governments to change their laws to make sure that far greater deforestation—perhaps all of it—becomes legal. This Environment Bill will then have little or no benefit in preventing deforestation. I know this is not the intention of the Government, but I ask the Minister to consider most carefully the risk of leaving Schedule 16 as it stands.

As other noble Lords know, deforestation is a huge global problem and solving it has to be a top priority for COP 26. Just a couple of statistics will make the point. In 2020 alone, primary humid tropical forest loss covered some 4.2 million hectares—an area the size of the Netherlands. Paragraphs 2(1) and 2(2) of Schedule 16 make it clear that, as long as local laws are complied with, commodities grown on land where forest has been cleared can be traded commercially by UK companies. However, deforestation behind UK imports of commodities accounts for an area of tree loss almost the size of the entire UK. This year has seen the highest deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon in over a decade. This will only get worse without this amendment.

Apart from the Bill as it stands incentivising Governments to legalise deforestation in their own countries, even now a third of tropical deforestation is defined as legal and will not be tackled by Schedule 16, unless it is amended. Scientists in Brazil tell us:

“Currently in Brazil, approximately 88 million hectares … 4 times the size of the UK, could be cleared legally on private properties under Brazilian forest law.”


Another major issue is that laws relating to land use, forests and commodity production are often uncertain, inconsistent or poorly implemented, making the determination of legality very difficult, time-consuming, expensive or virtually impossible. Schedule 16 as it stands risks bogging down UK courts with difficult questions about the interpretation and application of foreign laws.

I know the Government have absolutely no wish to impose these problems on our industries. If they accept this amendment, they will surely provide clarity, consistency and certainty for UK businesses and for the countries of origin where deforestation is currently taking place. Leading UK companies have appealed to the Government to support a more rigorous standard than that set out in Schedule 16.

I thank the head of the Bill team and four other officials for the very helpful meeting we had on Thursday. They argued that 70% of deforestation for agriculture is illegal. Yes, but 30% is legal. Also, this is changing as we speak. The Brazilian Government are in the process of legalising forest lands. Paulo from Brazil, at a highly informative Global Witness meeting—I thank Global Witness for its incredible help on this—referred to a recent forest code which has legalised 12 million hectares of forest and a legislative package that will retrospectively legalise deforestation. The Bill encourages further legalisation to circumvent laws based on legality. This is dangerous. I understand that, despite all these issues, the Government want to work with producer countries to improve governance. This approach assumes that we are dealing with Governments who share our values—sadly, we are not.

Paulo from Brazil was appealing to the UK—appealing to me to appeal to the Minister, I should say—to introduce a strong law to prevent commercial activity based on deforested land, whether legal or illegal. He is deeply concerned about his Government’s determination to undermine our legality-based legislation.